Modern communication systems that can provide a large number of capabilities including integration of various communication modalities with different services enable a wider array of communication between people. Social networking applications, multimodal enterprise communication applications, and comparable ones are examples of rapidly proliferating communication systems taking advantage of the modern capabilities.
Many communication applications or service (e.g. instant messaging, Voice over IP “VOIP” applications, and the like) employ a mechanism to maintain contacts. Such mechanisms are typically managed manually by the end user and difficult, if possible, to transfer or maintain over different services. Users may spend significant amount of time managing these contacts and deal with complicated long lists of contacts which may or may not be used frequently. As communication systems evolve and multi-modal, real-time or non-real-time communications become prevalent, management of contact information across various applications/services becomes an increasingly challenging task.